As the COVID-19 pandemic extended into its third year, the trauma students in colleges and universities experienced intensified rather than abated. Some students experienced the pandemic’s intersection with other sources of trauma, such as systemic racism, which added to and exacerbated existing injustices. These wider realities, as well as careful attention to the particular group of enrolled students, shaped a trauma-informed instructional design practice that we, a faculty member (Alison) and student co-facilitator (Van), developed in an undergraduate education course at one tertiary-level institution.
This practice included the co-creation and three related uses of numerous shared Google Docs. This practice was not only responsive to enrolled students’ particular needs and contextualized within the wider realities of the recent pandemic and ongoing systemic inequities. It was also situated in expanding understandings of trauma. While research on trauma has traditionally focused on the experiences of war veterans and survivors of childhood trauma, notions of “trauma-informed care” have expanded to recognize the impact of a wide range of traumatic experiences on individuals across contexts, including schools.
In contrast to early conceptions of trauma, which labeled victims as morally weak, trauma-informed practice in educational contexts avoids approaching students from a deficit perspective. Brunzell and colleagues (2019) offer a “practice pedagogy’ that includes attention to “aspects of healing (i.e. trauma- informed practice) and growth” in the classroom.
We created this environment by inviting every student to complete a Course Commitment Form to be shared with us as co-facilitators. This approach reflects three of the six key principles of a trauma-informed approach identified by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, 2014) This approach embraces empathy rather than deficit thinking (Thomas et al., 2019) and reflects additional SAMHSA (2014) principles: safety; moving past historical biases and stereotypes; and recognizing and addressing historical trauma.
Alison and Van's course involved weekly entries in personal journals, contributions to a collective annotated bibliography, fieldwork projects, research studies, and portfolios. All assignments endeavored to support life-affirming learning opportunities designed to ensure that social and emotional content were integrated with subject-specific content of the course. As part of our ongoing process of trauma-informed, self-care practice, our writing process has also been on a co-created, shared Google Doc on which we drafted and revised as well as invited enrolled students to comment. We offer recommendations for educators across institutional contexts and courses who might be interested in adapting this design strategy.
The course we co-facilitated in the Spring-2022 semester was called “Exploring and Enacting Transformation of Higher Education” This undergraduate education course was co-created in 2015 by Alison and then-undergraduate Crystal Des-Ogugua (Cook-Sather et al., 2018) It employs anti-racist pedagogy and is always co- Facilitated by a faculty member and an undergraduate student of color. The goal of this course was to make space for students to put their lived experiences into dialogue with published work and with other students’ lived experiences in order to explore, advocate for, and enact diversity, equity, and inclusion in the course, and in higher education more broadly.
Who we are also informed how we co-created a trauma-informed learning space and practice in this course. Alison, a tenured faculty member who identifies as a middle-aged, white, cis-gendered female, has taught this course numerous times since co-creating it with Crystal. Van, a third-year student, completed the course in Spring of 2021 and co-facilitated it in spring of 2022 while conducting an independent study on embodiment pedagogy. This work is premised on collaboration, mutuality, empowerment, voice, and choice. It specifically strives to redress the epistemic, affective, and ontological harms many equity-denied students experience in higher education.
Doing trauma-informed work with and for one another as facilitators was essential for us to be able to create a space for students to do analogous work of self-care and life-affirming learning (Imad, 2021). Discussion of Design Choice to Use Multiple, Shared, Co-created Google Docs During the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years, a great deal of teaching and learning unfolded via virtual platforms such as Zoom. It was a matter of necessity to find ways for faculty and students to engage with subject matter and its application. Our use of multiple, co-created, shared GoogleDocs was not necessarily required for those purposes.
Imad (2021) contends that it is critical for those facilitating learning to engage in self-care. In her discussion of what teachers need to manage their own trauma while supporting students, she writes: A calm nervous system can help calm other people’s nervous systems.
When our nervous system is calm, we are able to engage socially, be productive, and process new information. To calm our nervous systems and to plan class sessions for each week of the course, we met on each Sunday afternoon during the semester. We co-facilitated “Exploring.” Our collaboration began via Zoom, and as we talked, we used a single, co-created, shared Google Doc to record our hopes for the course overall and also to draft plans for specific components of each class session. This Doc, shared only between the two of us, captured emotional as well as practical aspects of our experiences. Bringing the social and intellectual into a single conversation space built trust, connection, and care that was
Because our goal for this course was to foster this kind of community for students, to construct such a space intentionally for ourselves allowed us to experience expressions of who we are and what we brought to our co-facilitation. The process of engaging in this way contributed to our continued growth and capacity to be flexible and responsive in relation to our collaboration with one another. We used this space to acknowledge our positionalities and how they informed our perceptions. These perceptions, in turn, informed our choices to push forward or step back on certain topics, and to engage in particular ways with individual students or groups. This use of a shared, co-created Google Doc allowed us. to develop a “practice pedagogy” that consistently attended
Our primary goal as co-facilitators was to address the needs and concerns of students. To do that well, we needed to attend carefully to the extent of our own capabilities. Using our meetings and co-creation of the Google Doc as a way to check in with one another both provided us with support and generated more ways in which we could enact trauma-informed care and facilitation for students. This kind of collaborative work is trauma informed and healing centered, and it allowed us to facilitate in ways that were also traumainformed and healing centric. Enacting this form of care is engaging in healing.
We used the co-created, shared Google Docs to map out daily plans. These included consistent components of each class session (e.g., check-in times) and estimated times after each segment of a class session. We also discussed reflective questions and substantive points we wanted to be sure to raise under each segment. These documents provided detailed documents to return to and build on for subsequent class sessions to ensure continuity. They also allowed us to generate the detailed plans we want to have so that we could focus our energy on engaging with students.
In these two ways, the co-created, shared Google Docs kept us connected and attentive to ourselves and to one another, as well as consciously aware of and attentive in our planning for an organization of students’ learning experiences. The physical and psychological environment should be a “welcoming and organized space” that includes “similar daily structures, reliable warmth, clear and consistent expectations, and predictability” (p. 4).
In addition to our awareness that students needed structure for engagement and organization, we had learned during our initial Zoom meetings with the class that enrolled students had different modes of and needs in learning, such as the use of the captioning while on Zoom. This specific understanding of the students enrolled, along with the general knowledge of students’ need for supportive structure, informed our decision to develop a set of co-created, shared Google Docs. We were affirming what students brought to the course, which helped students affirm themselves and experience empowerment, voice, and choice (SAMHSA, 2014).
The structures we created, designed to include everyone, both sent a message that people matter and demonstrated it in what students offered and what they gained through contributing. While we consistently provided these structures in class sessions, not everyone always participated; there was always choice. Having a clear agenda for the day “increases predictability and decreases student stress” (Hanover Research, 2019, p. 4). While we did not always stick to times allocated for each segment of the class session, the time windows were intended to provide structure.
Our outlines also responded to student interests and created a sense of stability, follow through, and reliability. Many, but not all, students followed along on the Google Doc outline during class, used it to access resources, and consulted it after class to follow up on ideas or resources shared. Another set of shared Google Docs we co-created for structure and organization was generated in response to subject-matter-focused resources that all students read, watched, or listened to in preparation for class sessions.
The experience of watching everyone type collectively contributed to the community building. A final set of shared Google Docs that we co-created for structure and organization collected strategies, reactions, and recommendations regarding students’ individual work on major assignments for the course, such as fieldwork and research projects. We created shared GoogleDocs on which all enrolled students could pool their thoughts and affirm one another’s efforts at different moments.
These moments included while students were preparing to undertake fieldwork and research projects, as they were in the midst of working on each. This set of Docs became a collection of both practical advice and affective support for student engagement in, and work for, the course. Enrolled students embraced and enacted a generative combination of introspection and sharing, which was nurtured as much by the comfortable silence in which we wrote together as by what we ended up sharing out loud. Our third use of co-created, shared Google Docs addressed specifically our recognition that students needed us and one another to pay attention to the social and emotional aspects of their learning. As Imad (2021) notes, “in our society in general
Yet the role of emotions in the human experience, including learning and healing, is indispensable. Centering well-being and care can help facilitators of student learning stay healthier themselves. Trauma-informed teaching includes creating “meaningful, positive teacher-student relationships”
recording student responses to “checking-in” prompts, and c.) capturing insights and inspirations. All of these were about making space for students and facilitators to share feelings, lived experiences, struggles, and successes. These methods recognize the importance of attending to needs on the human level and prioritizing how responding to those needs can inform learning in the class. They conveyed care for students’ well-being, and made students feel that they belonged in the course and mattered to others.
They unfolded at the intersection of two trauma-informed practices: co-creating “a safe, supportive, and trauma-sensitive classroom environment” and co- creating “community-building curricula” Having a Google Doc as a physical manifestation of the work of co-creation offered further affirmation of the time we spent enjoying and celebrating. We opened nearly every class session with a check-in prompt, a practice that is as important for facilitators as for students. The table below presents several examples of the kinds of prompts we offered and the questions themselves (see Table 1).
Use of check-in prompts and our collection of responses into shared Google Docs is another way of giving space for students to be heard, to feel important, and to attend to “aspects of healing and growth (Brunzell et al., 2019)
The final use of shared, co-created Google Docs we share here focused on ensuring that affective experiences were integral to course content. For example, we used snowball activities to ensure that students had embodied, community-building, affirming, and encouraging learning experiences.
Next, we went around in a circle reading aloud what was written with no framing or comments. Following that sharing, we discussed what we heard. Finally, one of us transcribed the student responses onto a shared Google Doc. Approaches such as this were very well received by the enrolled students and contributed to both classroom camaraderie and “community-building curricula” (Hanover Research, 2019, p. 3).
This design approach supports facilitators and enrolled students in co-creating life-affirming learning. It makes social and emotional as well as subject-matter content accessible to everyone. The approach also contributes to notions of what it means to be present (virtually and in-person)
We were careful to balance choice, autonomy, initiative, accountability, structure, and guidance. Working as co-facilitators, and even designating ourselves facilitators rather than teachers, contributed to the dynamic. When there was silence, or struggle, there were other spaces—outside of the actual classroom. The Google Docs could be a space students entered when they needed to in these moments or later.
The Docs offered possible next steps in the particular set of experiences we had planned but also made it possible to sit in silence and uncertainty. Often times, those affected by trauma are on an alert response (Imad, 2021), and sitting in silence can be a form of healing. This practice once again links trauma-informed care and healing-centered engagement. The trauma that students experienced has intensified rather than subsided as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drag on. As more traumatizing events unfold in the world, we need even more attention to students’ and facilitators’ experiences.
The use of co-created, shared Google Docs could work in a course in any institutional context with any number of enrolled students. facilitators are intentional about creating a safe and trusting learning environment, and take into consideration the recommendations and cautions we have offered. We issue this call to action: Make space for and affirm being as a way to acknowledge trauma and extend grace and love, and consider design strategies such as the development of shared GoogleDocs to co-create life-affirming learning.
Cook-Sather, A., Des-Ogugua, C., & Bahti, M. (2017). Articulating identities and analyzing belonging: A multistep intervention that affirms and informs a diversity of students. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(3), 374-389. Cook-S Heather, A. (2022). Co-creating equitable teaching and learning: Structuring student voice into higher education. Harvard Education Press.
https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/books/promoting-equity-and-justice-through-pedagogical-partnership/ Ezarik, M. (2022). Student mental health status report: struggles, stressors and supports. Hanover Research (2019) Best practices for trauma-informed instruction.
The study was published in the Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 422–452. The study looked at trauma-informed practices in schools across two decades. The report also looked at the role of students as co-teachers in anti-racist pedagogy. The findings were published in a book called Picture a professor: intersectional teaching strategies for interrupting bias about faculty and increasing student learning. The book was published by West Virginia University Press. For more information, visit: http://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/d7/priv/sma14-4884.pdf.